In a 1996 interview with KCRW’s Michael Silverblatt, David Foster Wallace explained the dizzyingly broad sweet of his magnum opus, Infinite Jest, in terms of a culture-overload that was singularly specific to late capitalism:

‘it seems to me that so much of pre-millennial life in America consists of enormous amounts of what seem like discrete bits of information coming in and that the real kind of intellectual adventure is finding ways to relate them to each other and to find larger patterns and meanings…’

This was, for all intents and purposes, before the Internet. Two decades on, his observation resonates with even greater force, as a daily inundation of digital content further enervates our weary attention spans. Indeed the greater the cultural saturation, the more urgent the search for meaning becomes. The work of constructing narratives is integral to both consumer culture and governance; is too important to be left to amateurs. Just as the idealistic artists of the 1960s and 70s inevitably drifted into – dare I say defected to – the advertising business, so it falls to the humanities graduates of the 21st-century to populate the ranks of the public relations industry in its myriad guises: technicians, as it were, of the human soul.

A title can do so much. If Yuri Herrera’s novel had been graced with one that was less imposing, it might have read in a more focused way: not as something ominous or terrifying, but as a stark narrative of both sides of the border between Mexico and the United States. Instead, there’s that title, and all that it implies. And there’s Herrera’s prose style, too, which accentuates the events that take place in this novel, turning them into something that approaches mythology but veers away at the last moment towards something stranger.

Sometimes, literary happenings bring together a fantastic abundance of things we like. Take this year’s Independent Bookstore Day, for example. (That’s happening on May 2, for the record.) An expansion of a California-wide event, this will now involve a host of indie bookstores across the nation. And if you’ll be in Chicago on May 2, it might be a wise choice to pay a visit to one or more of the 12 stores taking part in that city. Why, you may ask?

RuPaul would have you believe that his recent talk with Paul Holdengräber, part of the LIVE from the NYPL series, was an infomercial, an opportunity to plug a nearly endless stream of projects to an already rapt audience. While his new album, podcast, and wildly successful LOGO reality show, RuPaul’s Drag Race, now in its seventh season, were certainly featured throughout the night, RuPaul’s insistence on product placement is sleight of hand, a way to misdirect the spotlight from his sparkling intellect and Machiavellian talent for manipulating a narrative. This was never more evident than how off-balance interviewer Holdengräber seemed throughout, unable to take RuPaul by surprise, or to even gather a straight (pun intended, I suppose) answer from the seasoned performer.

An International House of Pancakes at three in the morning isn’t the first place where one might expect to witness a test of paranormal abilities. It isn’t often that one hears someone sitting at an adjoining table declare themselves as possessing psychic powers. Rarer still are those occasions when such a declaration is met with a challenge. Specifically: “You have psychic powers? I have psychic powers, too!” And yet, that’s exactly what I beheld one March night in the center of Texas.

That late at night, an IHOP is usually a place where one’s night winds down, accompanied by comfort food that slices days or weeks off your lifespan. After hearing this exchange, though, my pulse picked up. I’d wandered into the IHOP looking for a way to end the night; instead, I realized that I wouldn’t be falling asleep any time soon.

How do you write about the end of the world? Take that question at face value: how does one’s prose suggest that something cataclysmic has occurred in society, some rupture that has altered our means of communication? Consider it the flip side of Octavia E. Butler’s short story “Speech Sounds,” in which society as we know it crumbles after a biological condition causes humans to lose the ability to speak. The landscape that emerges in Butler’s story is an combination of modern technology and brutal violence, the “state of nature” talked about in political science popping up next door. It’s a scenario as terrifying as it is evocative, suggesting horrors both literal and societal that could emerge. In the case of Butler, the power of her story can be found in the gulf between the lucid prose used to describe this nightmarish situation and the spoken language on which her characters can no longer rely.

There’s a very good chance that you’ll see a Facebook link or tweet that proclaims some bit of real life news is “not an Onion article” at some point during your day. That’s been the rallying cry over the last few years in a world where the lines are sometimes blurred between real news and satire. In Welcome to Braggsville, T. Geronimo Johnson‘s new novel that buzzes with energy from the first page to the last, we get a book perfectly suited for these times.

Centering around a diverse group of college friends who plan an art prank on a southern town’s Civil War reenactment that doesn’t go according to plan, Johnson pulls off a tough balancing act, starting out like a rollicking hybrid of Barry Hannah, George Saunders, and Junot Díaz, and ending up with a tale that looks at (and at times skewers) youthful exuberance, history, race, and our Onion-headline world.

The stories in Kirstin Valdez Quade‘s debut collection Night at the Fiestas veer from carefully observed to visceral, showing complex familial dynamics and zeroing in on questions of class and geography. Quade is equally adept at showing a community from the inside and deconstructing it from the perspective of an outsider. The result is a moving portrayal of numerous lives across several decades of life in and around New Mexico. I reached out to Quade to learn more about the collection’s origins, her approach to the characters’ beliefs and dynamics, and more. This interview, conducted via email, is the result.